Workflow management is a rapidly evolving technology that many businesses in a variety of industries utilize to handle business processes. A business process, as defined by the Workflow standard—Terminology & glossary, Technical Report WFMC-TC-1011, Workflow Management Coalition, June 1996. Versions 2.0, is simply a set of one or more linked activities that collectively realize a business objective or a policy goal, typically within the context of an organizational structure defining functional roles and relationships. A workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or in part, during which documents, information, or activities are passed from one participant to another, according to a set of predefined rules. Business processes are often automated using Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs). WfMSs are tools that enable model-driven design, analysis, and simulation of business processes, which can be designed from scratch or from templates that support rapid application development. WfMSs also provide features for monitoring the execution of business processes and for automatically reacting to exceptional situations. The integration of WfMSs with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools further increases the effectiveness of these systems, and enables them to handle the two crucial aspects of process automation: end-to-end process flow management and interaction with the (heterogeneous) invoked applications. Finally, enhancement of WfMSs with support for B2B interaction standards will result in complete automation of business operations both within and across organizational boundaries.
Organizations need to integrate their processes in order to efficiently trade goods and services electronically and perform e-business transactions. Several industry standards, such as RosettaNet and the Common Business Library (CBL), are being developed in order to allow organizations to interoperate by defining common ontology, syntax for message exchanges, and flow of interactions among the business processes across organization boundaries.
In order to interact with a trade partner, an organization must not only be able to send and receive messages and carry out conversations according to a specific standard, but also be capable of coordinating the internal business processes with the external interactions. In addition, since B2B standards are constantly evolving as a result of the changes in the technology and needs of organizations, it is necessary for the business partners to quickly and easily adapt to the changes in the standards. The implementation of new standards and their integration with the internal business processes often require a lot of manual effort and take many months to complete. Moreover, the users (e.g., the designers of internal business processes) are usually required to deal with the details of B2B conversations, message formats, data mapping, etc. The process designer's time is better used in concentrating on designing the business logic of their organizations' business processes rather than worrying about the details of B2B interaction standards.
There exist many B2B interaction standards already in use or under development. Enterprises have to support many different standards in order to be able to carry on trade partnerships with multiple partners, because each partner might have adopted a different standard. In summary, even after B2B interaction standards are defined, there exist many important challenges that need to be addressed in order to build and operate on-line trade partnerships quickly and easily. Those challenges include how to minimize the manual effort in integration of existing and new internal business processes with external B2B interaction standards, how to adapt to the changes in B2B interaction standards, and how to hide B2B interaction details from the users, and how to support multiple B2B interaction standards in conversations with the trade partners.
Organizations may often need to carry on a conversation (i.e., exchange several messages with one or more business partners) in order to accomplish B2B interactions. Unfortunately, most B2B standards do not describe the complete conversational logic between trade partners. Some standards, such as EDI, only describe how individual transactions should be carried on. Some others, such as OBI and cXML, describe the contents of individual message exchanges. RosettaNet and CBL are two recently initiated B2B interaction standards that aim at describing the complete conversational logic between trade partners. Although those standards describe the contents of individual messages in a structured format, using either XML DTDs or schema language, the overall conversational logic is described as a combination of flat text and graphical representation (UML diagrams). In other words, those conversational logic descriptions aim the humans as the target audience. Process designers are supposed to read, understand, and implement the conversational logic themselves. Thus, intensive manual effort is required to implement those standards.
FIG. 9 illustrates a prior art partner interface process (PIP) that defines an interaction standard for a request for quote. A PIP definition includes a UML graph and text that describes the process. One problem with these high-level descriptions is that the UML graphs and unstructured textual representations are very difficult to interpret and use for automatically implementing the PIP.
Typically, only humans can interpret and use the descriptions. However, the standards may be interpreted differently that may lead to compatibility issues between business parties. In fact intensive manual efforts are required by process designers to integrate an external interaction standard with a particular workflow management system. This manual development is time consuming and difficult since there is no mechanism in the prior art to automatically generate B2B interaction standard compliant business processes or to adapt existing business processes to become B2B interaction capable.
Another problem that a designer of business processes faces is that there are many competing business-to-business interaction standards. Business partners, suppliers, vendors, and clients may implement different interaction standards. For example, a first partner may utilize a RosettaNet B2B interaction standard, whereas a second partner may utilize a CBL B2B interaction standard. In order to enable electronic commerce with both the first partner and the second partner, the designer is required to manually integrate its internal business processes with both the RosettaNet business-to-business interaction standard and the CBL B2B interaction standard.
This problem is further exacerbated by the constant evolving nature of these external B2B interaction standards. For example, a designer can work many months to integrate the internal processes with a first version of RosettaNet B2B interaction standard only to find that other new partners are now using another, more current, RosettaNet B2B interaction standard. The designer is then forced to integrate the internal processes to the new version of the RosettaNet B2B interaction standard. As can be appreciated, the designers can easily become bogged down with the detail of integrating the internal business processes with many different interaction standards and/or different versions of the same interaction standard.
There exist commercially available products that purport to support RosettaNet and other B2B interaction standards. Unfortunately, most of those products only provide simple tools for sending and receiving XML messages. A few of these products attempt to address the problem of integrating B2B interaction standards with internal workflows.
WebMethods includes a component that enforces the XML message exchange specifications of PIPs, such as preparing, submitting, receiving, and parsing XML documents, and waiting for acknowledgment and response messages. Unfortunately, the actual implementation of the conversational logic of PIPs still requires considerable manual effort.
BlueStone's Total-e-B2B product provides tools to develop, deploy, and manage B2B transactions. This product supports standards, such as XML, EDI, J2EE, etc. Unfortunately, the product does not support any standard that defines B2B conversations, such as CBL and RosettaNet.
Vitria's BusinessWare product has a RosettaNet centric version that purportedly supports currently published PIPs. The product provides basic functionality that is required to carry out B2B interactions based on RosettaNet PIP definitions. The product also performs data mapping from DUNS, UNSPSC, and GTIN standards, which are data standards accepted by RossettaNet. Unfortunately, this product does not provide integration with any internal workflow management systems.
BEA's WebLogic Collaborate Enabler for RosettaNet provides a “Process Integrator” that manages the exchange of XML messages with trade partners. Moreover, WebLogic provides templates for currently published RosettaNet PIPs. It appears that new templates are created manually from PIP definitions by WebLogic and provided to the customers in a template library.
While these approaches offer limited support for interactions among workflows executed in different organizations, these approaches do not provide an efficient approach for addressing the problem of integrating B2B interaction standards with internal processes. In this regard, it is desirable for there to be a mechanism that enables fast, template-driven generation of processes and services that can interact according to B2B interaction standards. Furthermore, it is desirable for there to be a complete methodology for automatically generating and using process and service templates that comply with B2B standards.
Based on the foregoing, there remains a need for a method and system for a mechanism that supports the integration of internal business processes with different external B2B interaction standards and that overcomes the disadvantages set forth previously.